Even though it covers 43% of the Earth's surface, the high seas – designated by jurists as being beyond national jurisdiction – tends to be defined only implicitly. Yet it is the site of various human activities (navigation, fishing, mineral exploration, etc.) and, in the current context of climate change and anthropogenic pressures on ecosystems, its ecological state is the subject of growing concern. 

For more than 15 years, these issues have been discussed at the United Nations in informal exchanges. This led to an intergovernmental conference opened in September 2018 on the conservation and management of biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction. In connection with this diplomatic process, various sites on the high seas are made visible by the advocacy of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) calling for their protection. These include a phenomenon located in the Eastern Tropical Pacific: the Costa Rica Thermal Dome.

This thesis aims to study the socio-political emergence of the Costa Rica Thermal Dome. This oceanic upwelling phenomenon is a rise of cold waters rich in nutrients, produced by the main winds and marine currents of the region, which moves seasonally between the waters under the jurisdiction of several Central American States and international waters. Discovered in the late 1940s by American oceanographers, the different issues related to the conservation of its biodiversity have emerged over the past decade, mainly under the action of the regional NGO MarViva.

As this matter involves a wide range of actors (NGOs, offshore fisheries, scientists, States, intergovernmental organizations, etc.), this research looks into the interactions and problems of collective action associated with the Thermal Dome, in order to question the conditions of emergence of a “common” of such complexity: how is the dome “built”? By which actors, through which discourses and using which knowledge? What collaborations and polarizations does it crystallize?

This thesis is based on a multi-location qualitative survey, centered around the gathering of a corpus of written documents (multidisciplinary scientific literature, grey literature, legal texts), semi-directional interviews and ethnographic moments.

The survey is conducted between France, Costa Rica and Nicaragua. A Central American trip was organized in 2021 to collect most of the data through interviews with stakeholders located between different coastal sites (Puntarenas, Cuajiniquil, Playas del Coco, San Juan del Sur) and the capital of Costa Rica, San José. 

The main result is the production of a PhD thesis in human geography: A limit to the ocean Frontier? The offshore construction of the Costa Rica Dome (defended on July 2nd, 2024)

A research paper has also been published: Questioning fishing access agreements towards social and ecological health in the Global South (Editions Agence française de développement, 2021)

This research explores this phenomenon’s social construction in the three main fields that have approached it: oceanographic sciences, fisheries, and biodiversity conservation.

Since  its  inception  as  a  social  object,  the  Dome  has  remained  an  offshore  space,  hardly accessible, manageable or governable to actors who have deployed various strategies to know and utilize it. Oceanographic research has increasingly mobilized remote technical mediation to decipher a geophysical space with  fuzzy  contours. Various fisheries, especially industrial and from distant-water fishing nations, recurrently came close to the Dome’s occurrence. These encounters nevertheless did not prove strategic on a stable basis and fishers still relate to it as a fluid space whose dynamic configurations serve them in labile ways.

More recently, the Dome has also become a subject for the global marine conservation sector. Under the leadership of Environmental Non-Governmental  Organizations,  it is  being  constructed  as a  geography  of promise to advocate governance solutions for the protection of biodiversity in the High Seas. Yet,  as  an  offshore  feature,  the  Dome  appears  at  the  limit  of  the  human  world.  Beyond appropriation, it invites us to consider a narrative other than the "ocean Frontier" – which has been a particularly strong narrative over the past years, building on views of oceans’ openness and emptiness as opportunity for human expansion and control.

Contacts: 

• Nadège Legroux, PhD in Human Geography, UMR SENS
• Stéphanie Leyronas, research officer, AFD

MPAs are often associated with high poverty, being by design targeted at relatively untouched areas with low economic potential. Establishing an MPA can thus create a financial and social burden on resource-dependent communities, even if the benefits of doing so would bring higher yields or revenue in the future. Some stakeholders may benefit greatly from commercial activities (e.g., tourism, sale of higher-value products), while at the same time others are left out of the management processes, sometimes even those having most at stake. 

Because MPAs will most likely affect user groups disproportionately, inequality issues among stakeholders can easily arise.  Some aspects of MPA design, implementation, and management may contribute to positive ecological and well-being outcomes, while others will require tradeoffs. This coexistence of both co-benefits and trade-offs among stakeholder groups leads to tricky questions of equity, justice, and power in the design, implementation, and management of MPAs. There is a general lack of knowledge regarding how inequalities influence MPA outcomes. 

In brief, MPAs are a driver of inequalities in communities that rely heavily on marine resources, and a powerful tool to help reduce them. While being an important aspect of the well-being of the people involved and of the success of MPAs, inequality assessments and metrics are currently largely absent in the design, implementation and management of MPAs. This research project aimed at a deeper understanding of the inequality dynamics in MPAs in Indonesia, drawing upon existing data and specific case studies. It helped us gain better knowledge of how inequalities influence biological and social outcomes in MPAs, and brought insights on how to integrate inequality assessments and indicators in existing MPA policies in the country, at every level of governance.

This project is part of the Extension of the EU-AFD Research Facility on Inequalities (RFI). Coordinated by AFD and financed by the European Commission, the Extension of the RFI will contribute to the development of public policies aimed at reducing inequalities in four countries: South Africa, Mexico, Colombia and Indonesia over the period 2021-2025.

This project first went through a scoping phase which enabled to better understand the role of MPAs and its link to inequalities. It then aimed to develop a framework for analyzing inequalities and their dynamics in MPAs in Indonesia, and a toolbox for mainstreaming inequalities in the design, implementation and management of MPAs. It has also fed into the policy dialogue conducted by the EU and AFD on marine resource management and environmental protection. 

This project therefore results in: 

• A working paper summarizing the current knowledge on marine protected areas and inequalities in Indonesia (carried out by LPEM).
• An in-depth research project on the links between inequality reductions and the management of marine protected areas, including cases studies of three MPAs (performed by the SMERU Institute).
• Training and capacity building activities with practitioners and MPA managers on the inclusion of inequalities in MPA management practices.
  
   

You will find below the different research papers related to this project :

• The benefits of Marine Protected Areas in fighting inequality and fostering environmental sustainability in Indonesia
• Balancing conservation and community welfare: Enhancing the management of Marine Protected Areas in Indonesia

Watch the replay of the "Research Conversations" webinar on this topic (July 2023) :

Contacts: 

• Oskar Lecuyer, AFD Research Officer
• Emmanuel Fourmann, AFD Research Officer

This research project proposes to estimate the distributive effect of gasoline taxes using a fiscal incidence considering these effects in the context of Mexico´s fiscal system, including the principal tax and spending instruments. 

In 2014, Mexico’s Finance Ministry (SHCP) introduced a special tax (IEPS) on carbon as a green tax aimed at reducing the green gas emission associated with fossil fuels, mainly gasoline and diesel. However, the tax revenue (4699 million pesos in 2014) and the environmental impact of this tax are marginal: in the past decade, until 2014, this tax had a negative value, thus working as a subsidy. Since that year, it became a tax, which has grown significantly in recent years, representing close to 300 billion pesos in 2019 and 2020. This is therefore in effect by far the most important green tax implemented in Mexico today. 

This analysis is of particular interest for Mexico at present because the transition from fuel subsidies to fuel taxes represents in effect the principal tax reform implemented in Mexico over the last decade in terms of both tax revenue (from -300 to +300 billion pesos in tax revenue) and distribution. Gasoline taxes have significant impacts on all the population, both directly on middle- and higher-income households through private transport, but especially indirectly for lower income households through public transport and transport costs for all goods and services, notably food. Preliminary analysis at the Fiscal Policy Equity Lab (FPEL) reveals that the increase in the indirect tax burden for the poor associated to gasoline taxes may reverse the effect poverty-reduction effect of direct transfers, even after their recent expansion. 

Quantifying these impacts precisely will allow the design of compensatory instruments to protect the poorest and most vulnerable groups from the regressive effects of these taxes. 

This project is part of the Extension of the EU-AFD Research Facility on Inequalities (RFI). Coordinated by AFD and financed by the European Commission, the Extension of the RFI will contribute to the development of public policies aimed at reducing inequalities in four countries: South Africa, Mexico, Colombia and Indonesia over the period 2021-2025.

This project is a joint undertaking between RIBOS, CEQ Institute and LNPP. It seeks to estimate the effect of green taxes in the context of the overall Mexican tax system through the international methodology developed by the Commitment to Equity Institute (CEQI), using INEGI data from the Encuesta de Ingresos y Gastos de los Hogares (ENIGH) for 2014-2020, among other data sources. 

This methodology will allow an estimation the effect of green taxes in the context of the overall fiscal system. This methodology facilitates comparability in time and space, and generates a wide variety of incidence indicators, including effects on the income Gini coefficient as well as income poverty using national and international poverty lines. 

This project ultimately aims to provide Mexican policy makers and stakeholders with timely analyses of the effects of tax policies on inequality and poverty. The research conducted will therefore result in: 

• a research paper ;
• a policy brief whose analysis is based on the collaborative intelligence technique. Two sessions in which the model calibration and hypotheses will be discussed following the collaborative modeling framework. Participants in the sessions will be members of the expert network and key tax policy makers.

You will find below the research paper related to this project:

• Distributive impact of green taxes in Mexico (July 2024)

The policy brief related to this project will soon be published here.

Contact: 

• Anda David, AFD Research Officer